What did they want to do with their lives? They did not know, or they did not want to know, because perhaps it would still not be possible, even now. Everything was so uncertain. No one knew what was going to happen, not them, not their parents, not their teachers. It was possible to travel abroad now, but you needed money to do that, and how did you get money when there was no work? One of the women I saw as girls actually had two children of her own. She wanted to do a doctorate on German-language emigrant literature in the Netherlands, but she would need to spend some time in the Netherlands, and how did you do that? She had been to Berlin once since the Wall fell. And how did you feel? Furious. She had stood beside a gap in the Wall, in those first few days, back in November, and had seen “in a flash” that the prison had not been built of bricks, but of people.
Anyone who wants to become acquainted with this world should read Uwe Johnson’s Begleitumstände: Frankfurter Vorlesungen. Understanding this country involves travelling back in time along lines of written words, over and over again: they draw you into the past in order to clarify the present. This is the dual function of literature: subversion during and testimony afterwards. The lucidity of the rebel reveals the stupid sophistication of the system. Stupid sophistication—is that even possible? Yes, it is. It occurs when a system uses political sophistication to allow its intellectual stupidity to penetrate into every corner of the state, when it constantly knows where it needs to focus its attention, and that is always on those who do not participate. This causes the totalitarian state to suffer. The opposing view is a void it cannot tolerate; the subversive thought is what is lacking from its totality, a gap it must fill with its power, because where the state is open, it is vulnerable.
New images are now mixing with the old ones: on television I see the wooden shed at Checkpoint Charlie, which I have passed by so often, slowly rising into the air on a tall crane. Levitation, a spiritualist séance—for a moment it seems as though it is being taken up into heaven. There is something peculiar about the sight of a building hanging in the air; you suddenly see what a foolish structure it always was. The onlookers gaze at the resulting empty space like children watching a conjuring trick: now you see it, now you don’t. There is a lot of magic going on these days; the whole city is populated by magicians. Walls and towers disappear, vanish into thin air; what once existed is now a fata morgana. People walk through the Wall as though it is made of air; what is there is not there.
I know that I must say farewell to this melting land, but I cannot do so yet. There is too much unfinished business; words and images are still entangled in my thoughts. Johann Georg Hamann saw in history “ciphers, hidden signs, hieroglyphs of God.” I do not know whether they belong to God, but after all those months I feel enmeshed in those signs; they are scars on a living organism, as in Dresden, as in Potsdam. Germany is unfinished. It is ancient, but it is still being made, and that ambiguity makes it fascinating. Herder says that nations develop at different rates, like people. If you subscribe to that idea, you could say that France and England are fully formed, adult: we know them. But do we know Germany? Does Germany know itself? Does this country know what it wants to be when it is big? And Gombrowicz whispers about “another, probably more hidden and less legitimate, aim of man . . . his need for the Incomplete . . . Imperfection . . . Inferiority . . . Youth . . .”—and now, in my last week here, that thought keeps coming back to me. Even after all these centuries, there is still no definition of Germany; it remains an enigma. In his latest book, Die Schere, Ernst Jünger reflects upon that word: “enigma” was a word shared by the Greeks and Romans for a puzzle, a secret, the unfathomable. It is Kant’s An sich, the essence that cannot be known; it is, in Luther’s translation, “das dunkle Wort,” the dark word. Germany as a dark word, as a spiritual mystery behind a veil of power and material success, as a country that you attempt to read, ancient, and yet the youngest of all European states.
I remember seeing a picture of Dresden: a man standing in front of a sculpture, staring as though he hoped to unravel its mystery. The day was grey, rainy, with those strange flashes of fateful sunshine that distort everything. The sculpture was the head of a hero on a pediment, out of context, on the ground near the Schloss. As I said, things unfinished: pediments on the ground, checkpoints in the air, walls lying flat. Everything flows. The man stood with his back to me, hands clasped; you could see that he was thinking. His shadow lay beside him like a small pet, and the two of them had a great deal to think about, as did I. I had just seen the ruins of the Frauenkirche with, in their midst, a blackened statue of Luther holding an open book that could only be the Bible he had translated. He stood there in front of some sort of construction trailer, young, thinner than usual, as though this still visible war had caused him to lose a few pounds. A scorched wreath lay at his feet and, in the background, a golden angel danced on one leg above a dome that looked like a peeled tropical fruit. I thought about the connection between that man and the ruins, about his anti-Semitism, about how his mighty Bible translation had forged the German dialects into a single language, providing the impetus for Germany as a nation, about how impossible my wandering, unfinished thoughts would be to prove, how frivolous, because everything in history is connected to everything else and the earlier darkness must often bear the later guilt. But those ruins were not frivolous; the black of the air pollution made it seem as though all of the broken, cracked walls, columns, spandrels, capitals, arches and stones were covered with lava, as though this harm had come not from above, rained down by a destructive, vengeful enemy, but had boiled up from a burning underworld.
Hermann Maternstraße, East Berlin, May 1990
Nowhere can architectural details be seen as clearly as in ruins, where ornamentation that was designed for an entire structure now exists only for itself. The drama of a ruin is determined by the beauty of its disconnected elements. And maybe these are Hamann’s divine hieroglyphs: architraves and archivolts, mouldings and cornices, stripped of their function, protruding from the debris, maybe foolish, maybe magnificent. As so often happens, my thoughts found an echo later that day: I visited a second-hand bookshop, where I found a book about the First World War, Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges, edited by Ernst Jünger in 1930. Luther, Jünger, Hamann, Herder, nothing to do with one another, everything to do with one another; German figures from the endless series of spirits that can be summoned up when you reflect upon that country at night. “Im Kriege selber ist das Letzte nicht der Krieg” (In war itself, war is not the ultimate purpose), it says in the front of Jünger’s book, but he did not write this oracular statement himself; it comes from Schiller’s Die Piccolomini. It sets the tone, though, the mystical veil that characterizes so much of the work of Jünger the shaman-samurai, shrouding its lucidity. The man who could write so clearly about enigmas is himself one. Delphic profundity, the architecture of a beetle’s carapace, designer of a portrayal of humankind in which freedom and obedience are supposedly identical, a terrible Faust, who works on paper to cobble together his “Typus” as a utopian robot, while people of flesh and blood walked all around him, people for whom freedom had long been equated with obedience. Great writer and frequenter of collaborators, hermit and symbol of contradiction—I never know quite what to make of him. When I mention his name to a group of philosophers and young academics one evening in Berlin, one of the young men stares at me, raises his hands like a priest and says, “Vade retro, Satanas,” and yet that young exorcist leaves at the end of the evening with the new Jünger biography under his arm. The book I have bought is in Gothic script, and that too has certain connotations for a non-German, connotations that are not easy for Germans to feel, particularly when, as in this book, the chapter headings are in Gothic capital letters, which is not unlike deciphering runes: In the photographs accompanying the words I see neither “princes of the trenches with hard, determined faces,” nor the “purer, bolder warriorhood” that was forged by fire. As usual, I see nothing but pictures of atrocit
ies, intensified by the outdated photographic technology, which makes the atrocity somehow seem more absurd (everyone is already dead anyway), reducing the antiquated, bullet-riddled tanks, the dead horses, the men in the mud, the living creatures in the rubble, the bayonets in the snow, the nameless columns of men in the stunned landscape, to an aesthetic category from which all the suffering and humiliation have melted away and heroes have become victims, robbed even of their deaths.
Dresden, May 1990
Maybe only someone who was still suffused with the spirit of the Middle Ages and knightly ideals (or their nineteenth-century echo) and who also had an ice-cold, modern eye for our mutation under the totalitarian rule of technology could capture and describe the contradictions of that era in this way. But precisely because his writing is so effective, the image I see as I am reading is a horseman of a frozen apocalypse, on a pale horse, of course, riding over an endless battlefield of anonymous corpses, painted by Francis Bacon, untouched by his own fate or that of others, a blind prophet, literally so—because if I do not think that, all I see is an older gentleman dressed in civvies in wartime Paris, someone who reads Psalm 90 after breakfast and browses in second-hand bookshops, who studies butterfly wings and in one single page of his diary leaps from the aesthetics of a bombing to the fourth act of Don Juan, meditates about scissors as a unity of opposites, becomes lost in contemplation of the tiger lily on the table in front of him, muses about the strength that can break flowers and other paradoxes of the wall of time, and then goes off again to visit wealthy ladies, or writers we might perhaps call traitors because they sided with the enemy under Pétain while the Vichy police were transporting their Jewish compatriots to that country about which that same elderly and maybe somewhat eccentric gentleman—who has the uniform of that country hanging in a wardrobe at home, but is now running his hands over twenty volumes of Saint-Simon with aesthetic delight—had written at the end of his own book: “For the power of the secret Germany is great and the concerns of the world recognized this far sooner following the Great War than the Germans did themselves.” And that is still true, and yet it is no longer true.
What awaits me now is a temporary cessation of entanglements, questions, paradoxes. Ostgeld flows into Westgeld, the border evaporates, one national anthem dissolves into the other, the embassies in East Berlin shrivel away, elections in six months’ time, the words “East” and “West” revert to their former meanings, the entire map of the country is a single color, the chemical wedding of a male citizen of Cologne and a female citizen from Weimar, the platonic union of these two individuals as citizens of the only Germany that now exists, two citizens rocked in the arms of Europe, from which no country can now break free without injuring itself.
I decide to celebrate my farewell in the melancholy gardens of Sanssouci and drive there over the Glienicker Brücke, Smiley’s bridge. It is weather for spies: squalls of rain, followed by vanilla-colored sunlight. A squad of Russians comes towards me, a long line of men carrying spades. They look like they have been walking for days, but that cannot be true, as they are not carrying any kit. I have to wait as they cross the road and I get a good look at them, because it happens so slowly. There is something ancient about the passing crowd, faces from all regions, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Russians, the great masses of the East. What is going through their minds? Their oversized caps perch on their heads; some of them smile in the general direction of my car, but I cannot see what they are thinking. They have partly withdrawn from Hungary and Czechoslovakia already, but they will be staying here. There are no houses for them at home, no work; the changes can already be seen here in a world that is pulling away from their own. What sort of memories and opinions will they take with them when they return home, and how will those thoughts become deformed and return to us as a far greater challenge than German Unity?
I park my car and go for a walk in the gardens of Frederick the Great. The rain drums on my umbrella, the distances between the buildings are immense, I am made to feel small, a homunculus among the luxuriant rhododendrons, a sketched figure beneath the classical arches, sheltering in the symmetrical forest of columns. Gloomy weather, clairvoyant afternoon, a clarity that allows you to see everything: the green twig emerging from the bark of the lime tree, the ragged Corinthian capitals of the ruin, the tattered, beheaded angel on the steps, the pointless spiral staircase of the Belvedere ending in mid-air, the dead field mouse in the mud still staking some claim. With the obligatory slippers on my feet, I glide across the polished floor of the ballroom in the Neues Palais, but I cannot keep pace with the Rococo. I stalk past the Jagdkammer and Unteres Damenschlafzimmer and think about the young prince, whom his father ordered to be taken, under strict guard, along the still-existing Reichsstraße I to Küstrin (Kostrzyn), where he was made to watch the execution of his friend Hans von Katte, who had assisted him during his failed escape attempt. Outside, it continues to rain. A Moor looks out over nature that has been deformed and clipped into shape, raising his triple lamp to the leaden sky. Beside him stands a dismantled woman, naked, headless, her hands just rusty iron spikes, a submissive posture, mound of Venus sooty from the invisible dirt in the air. The great king would not recognize his palace. Past trees he would have seen when they were just saplings, I walk to the orangery, the golden pavilion. The daisies shine in the grass like some kind of mould, and in the distance I can hear trains and crows. My German year is at an end. I shall say farewell to my friends and leave without leaving, because of the memories I am taking with me and leaving behind and, when I return, everything will be different, yet still the same, and changed forever.
June 30, 1990
1 Freie Deutsche Jugend (F.D.J.)—Free German Youth. See also Glossary.
Belvedere, Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam
PART II
BERLIN SUITE
The final photograph in Part I of this book shows the Belvedere in the gardens of Sanssouci, in Potsdam, and the last sentence ended with the words: “and, when I return, everything will be different, yet still the same, and changed forever.” It was in itself not a difficult prediction to make. The Wall would be gone, but the familiar buildings would still remain, and the two parts of the city would, I believed, slowly move towards each other, along with the people who lived there. Old newspapers would disappear and new ones would take their place, West Berlin would become busier and busier, and in the East the signs of capitalism would start making gradual inroads. I recently went back to visit the Belvedere. It was no longer the open, wounded ruin it had been since the war, dismantled, violated, weeds among the pillars. Its decay was wrapped up like one of Christo’s buildings, the desecration invisible. The signs of war will disappear from this building; it will no longer serve as a memento. On the contrary: if it ever resurfaces from beneath those black rags, it will gleam, a model of classical architectural style, a showpiece. Yet it will also look a little dead, like an actress with a facelift.
What kind of city had I returned to? I still did not know. This was in fact a double return: the first in February, the second in April. In the intervening period, the doubt had intensified; it was becoming increasingly difficult to say anything about the situation. I myself remained more or less the same, even though no one steps into the same river twice. The setting was also the same: same city, same house, same wooden lion on the handrail in the dark hallway, same smell of tobacco and German food in the stairwell. My Chilean friend had taken some of his books and paintings away to the other side of the earth, but there was still enough Spanish there to keep a reader occupied for a year, and the strange furniture of exile also remained. It snowed on my first return, and the chestnut tree in the courtyard still reached close to my windows, and I could see how cold the tree felt. The neighbors with the children in the flat opposite had disappeared and the new ones were invisible. The old woman beneath me, who was the oldest resident and had known the house before the war (“you simply can’t imagine what the bombings were like”), had become increa
singly confused over the past few months, and then she had died. I wondered if anyone in the world still thought about her sometimes. Big cities allow people to disappear without a trace, but I can still picture her big shoes, her stiff gait, her closed expression. But no one ever mentioned her. A company with the word “Europe” in its name had moved in on her floor. The people I sometimes saw coming out of there looked as though they had stepped straight out of an advertisement.
I went on scouting expeditions in the snow. I remember one time encountering a surviving piece of Wall with metal rods sticking out of it, a dead, snow-covered passageway, the rods like grasping, black tentacles, but nothing happened. I stood there on that narrow piece of land that would soon be ordinary again, part of a much larger piece of land, with no more than traces, imprints of the two missing walls in the soil, and I realized that there was nothing to say. Any thoughts about that concrete memory had been thought to death; like the Wall itself, they had met their end. It felt much stranger in those places where the Wall no longer was, at Checkpoint Charlie, for instance. But you could no longer say “at Checkpoint Charlie” either, because now it existed only in photographs. Describing a place in terms of what is no longer there can be difficult. The Wall that is no longer there exists in duplicate, because you have to imagine it in the place where it once actually was. Or maybe not, but it happens automatically. You cannot walk through a wound unharmed, and that wound is everywhere. As are the scars. Many of the checkpoint buildings are still standing, empty, pointless. They have to go, or someone needs to find a use for them. The currency exchange office at Invalidenstraße has become a Beate Uhse sex shop, which is sure to go down well. Slowly the big clean-up will begin, but that is outside, in the city. The inner clean-up will have to wait for people who have not yet been born, for the new inhabitants, or for the unthinking, but there are few of those. It seems as though everyone has the Wall in their mind; sooner or later it comes up in every conversation. Are people becoming used to it? Not really. You can now hop onto the S-Bahn to the East without having to get off at Bahnhof Friedrichstraße; you just carry on through. The train windows sketch the city for you: the gap where the Wall once stood, the drabness, the Stalinist architecture, the other. No, you cannot get used to that, and you cannot blow it up either; it is going to remain intact. Soon, rents for the unpainted houses will rise, and growing numbers of unemployed people will be living in those colorless buildings. And that too is a Wall of a kind.
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